The universe is a symphony

When Michio Kaku talks, people should listen. Not because when, as a high school student, he built a particle accelerator in his family’s garage. Or because Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, tried to recruit him (unsuccessfully) into a Star Wars weapons development program.

Listening to him yesterday being interview by NPR’s Terry Gross (transcript), I was stuck by Kaku’s beautiful description of his String Field Theory, which attempts to describe in one tiny mathematical formula the nature of the universe – or, in Einstein’s words “The Mind of God”:

Well, very simply, that all the sub-atomic particles – neutrons, protons, quarks – are nothing but musical notes on a tiny rubber band, that when you twang the rubber band, it changes from one frequency to another. So it changes from an electron to a neutrino. And you twang it enough, it can turn into all the subatomic particles we see in the world.

So all the subatomic particles that make up our body are nothing but different notes on many, many, many tiny little violin strings, little rubber bands, and that physics is nothing but the laws of harmony of these vibrating strings. Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on these vibrating strings. The universe is a symphony of strings, and the mind of God that Einstein wrote eloquently about the last 30 years of his life, is cosmic music resonating through 11-dimensional hyperspace.